School Information System

Open The Books:

Debates about public school funding sometimes include an underlying assumption that more funding results in better student outcomes. Available data tells a more complex story. Our review of 12,531 school districts across the country shows a negative correlation between overhead and student performance. In other words, districts that spent more on teacher and administrative pay saw their students’ standardized test scores drop.

Using the Open the Books proprietary database of government salaries across America, we calculated how much each U.S. state increased its total public school payrolls from 2019 to 2023. We compared that number to the change in each state’s ranking on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which measures reading and math skills for 4th and 8th graders.

VIEW THE DATA HERE

By plotting the percentage change in payroll, state by state, versus the percentage change in the national rankings of its districts, a surprising picture emerges. Growing payrolls are not closely correlated with improved performance among districts in a given state. In fact, the opposite correlation appears. There is a mild inverse relationship between these two data sets. Higher overhead costs are associated with lower test scores. [1]

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This research suggests that an increase in administrator pay is a more likely cause of the negative correlation with student achievement.

Administrative bloat in public schools is not new. Benjamin Scafidi, an Economics of Education professor at Kennesaw State University, found that the number of non-teaching staff at U.S. schools increased by 702% from 1950 to 2009, while the number of teachers increased by only 252%. Meanwhile, student scores on the NAEP fell.

Scafidi wrote that this “irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars is indefensible,” and that was before the surge in salaries over the last few years. From 2010 to 2022, the number of administrative staff rose by another 41%, while overall school employment rose by only

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Dave Cieslewicz:

Where would I be without the Madison School Board?

Every month or so they provide me with fodder for this blog. Why, just last week the district touted a new logo for which they paid an out-of-state design company $100,000, only months after the voters gave them another $600 million in taxing authority to spend, we thought, on actual education.

The Board provides me with so much material that I really should pay them. But then again I don’t need to as they’re poised to double their own salaries and give themselves taxpayer financed health insurance.

The Board will soon vote to make official a pay increase from $8,000 to $15,000. The Board president will get more and they’ll also get stipends to attend meetings that one would think are part of the job and should be covered by their salary. And then there’s the health insurance that will cost taxpayers about $200,000 a year if all seven board members take it.

According to a story in the Wisconsin State Journal, Board member Savion Castro summed up the reasons when he stated that most school boards are structured for “older, whiter, wealthier folks,” but that’s not an accurate reflection of the Madison district’s diverse student body, and increasing pay could make board positions “more accessible to the folks that look like the students and the families of the district.”

But, wait a minute. Four of the current board’s seven members are people of color, and two identify as having disabilities. There are no white men on the Board and nobody is wealthy. And in fact, one of the most dedicated, impactful board members in recent decades was Mary Burke, who committed the unpardonable sins of being both white and wealthy.

And while I’m on the topic, the philosophy behind Catro’s remark is pretty dangerous. Because he’s saying we should discourage public service based on race and income. In principle that’s what Jim Crow was.

….

And as for diversity, the real diversity we lack on this Board is diversity of opinion. There’s not a single member of this group that cares about taxpayers, good order in the schools, test scores or the fact that Madison is losing students to other districts and charter schools. Instead, all seven members of the Board are, like Castro, obsessed with identity politics.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

WILL:

The News: WILL has unveiled a new policy report, “Closing Wisconsin’s Math Gap: A Call for Early Numeracy Reform,” sounding the alarm on declining math achievement and offering solutions to reverse the crisis. The report draws on lessons from seven states that have led the way in implementing serious, practical, and bipartisan numeracy reforms. These efforts build on early literacy reforms adopted by dozens of states around the nation, including Wisconsin.

The Quotes: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, stated, “Without strong math skills, Wisconsin’s students will struggle in school, at work, and in life. This report highlights practical and bipartisan success stories from seven states that acted, and now it’s time for Wisconsin to do the same. If we want our kids to succeed in school and our workforce to stay competitive, we must start building a stronger math foundation in the early grades.”

WILL Associate Counsel, Lauren Greuel, stated, “School districts don’t have to wait for the Legislature to act. Our model policy gives school boards a clear framework to identify struggling students, support teachers, and close early skill gaps before they grow.”

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Math Forum Audio / Video and Links.

Chris Rickert:

In the survey that opened Sept. 2 and closes Sept. 26, district residents are asked to rank their top five priorities for the district. Among the choices are the “ability to have choice in school options such as magnet, STEM, Charter” and “access to language immersion programs such as Spanish (dual-language immersion) or other options.”

Green said that in her 11 years with the district, she doesn’t recall asking residents about whether they’d like options outside of the neighborhood schools framework. But the district has fielded plenty of questions from the public about it, she said.

“The community I’ve heard over the years, even just since I’ve been here, really an arts academy or a school for the arts, I’ve heard quite a bit, based on the arts-rich community we live in,” she said. “I’ve heard STEM, also.”

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The September survey is part of the district’s broader review of school attendance area boundaries. Dubbed “Building for the Future,” the review also is aimed at figuring out the best uses for two plots of district-owned land on the Far East and Far West sides, and evaluating district programs and options to make sure the district is “responsive to the needs of the city’s rapidly changing community,” according to the district’s communications office.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Ann Althouse summary

“Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed.“

Said Sonia Sotomayor, quoted in “Sotomayor rebukes calls to ‘criminalize free speech’ in apparent swipe at Pam Bondi/The justice, in public remarks, didn’t name the attorney general, who has come under fire for comments to target people over ‘hate speech'” (Politico).

And so ends the decades long push — by the left — to criminalize hate speech. Thanks, Justice Sotomayor!
Posted b

Bloomberg:

Chicago is stepping in to lend cash to its underfunded pensions so they have enough money to avoid asset sales to cover retirement checks as they wait for property taxes to come in after a computer issue delayed collections.

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more.

Amy Kazmin:

Italy’s official rates of pet ownership — about 40 per cent of households report having at least one pet — may still be well below those of the UK and the US, at 60 per cent and 66 per cent respectively. But Tortorella, who also runs a dog day-care in the centre of Rome, says that while Italians have always loved dogs, “in the last 10 years, dogs or cats have really become treated as a member of the family. It’s a new, pet-friendly culture. They do the same things for their dogs as you can do with a child.”

From dog day-care with pick-up and drop-off shuttle services, to specialised pathology labs, to the organisation of solemn pet funerals, new enterprises are catering to the needs of the full pet life cycle.

In 2022, Italians spent €6.8bn on petcare, according to Nomisma, an Italian consultancy. While dogs were once fed table scraps, people are increasingly fussy over what they give them. “They worry about what they eat, the quality,” Tortorella said. “Now people cook for their pets.”

Wall Street Journal:

Discussing Kirk’s work on college campuses, Ms. Bondi mentioned the “disgusting” antisemitism on display at many universities, and so far so good. But wait. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place—especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” the country’s top law enforcer told a podcast. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

Kirk would want a word. “My position is that even hate speech should be completely and totally allowed in our country. The most disgusting speech should absolutely be protected,” he once told a crowd. “The ACLU used to hold this viewpoint. The American Civil Liberties Union, they sued so that legitimate Nazis could march through downtown Skokie.”

Why? “As soon as you use the word ‘hate,’ that is a very subjective term,” Kirk said, in a video posted by his group in 2020. “Then all of a sudden it is in the eyes, or it is in the implementation, of whomever has the power.”

He was right, as governments around the world are proving almost daily. Armed British police recently arrested Graham Linehan, a TV sitcom writer, and reportedly questioned him about his posts on the internet, including one that read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” He says it was a joke, and it’s stupid, but criminal?

Stefan Fatsis: 

In 2015, I settled in at the Springfield, Massachusetts, headquarters of Merriam-Webster, America’s most storied dictionary company. My project was to document the ambitious reinvention of a classic, and I hoped to get some definitions of my own into the lexicon along the way. (A favourite early drafting effort, which I couldn’t believe wasn’t already included, was dogpile : “a celebration in which participants dive on top of each other immediately after a victory.”)

Merriam-Webster’s overhaul of its signature work, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged—a 465,000-word, 2,700-page, 13.5-pound doorstop published in 1961 and never before updated—was already in full swing. The revision, which would be not a hardback book but an online-only edition, requiring a subscription, was expected to take decades.

Not long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Pageviews were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company’s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google’s algorithms had punished Merriam’s search results. The company had always been lean and profitable, but the financial hit was real. Merriam’s parent, Encyclopedia Britannica, was facing challenges of its own—who needed an encyclopedia in a Wikipedia world?—and ordered cuts. Merriam laid off more than a dozen staffers. Its longtime publisher, John Morse, was forced into early retirement. The revision of Merriam’s unabridged masterpiece was abandoned.

Dave Cieslewicz:

MMSD’s case is much more infuriating. This is a district with lagging test scores, high truancy rates and lots of police calls and this is what they’re spending time and money on? And it’s the taxpayers’ money that they’re incinerating. What they’re doing is trying to create a new image without improving the substance. It’s like painting a house with a rotten foundation and a sagging roof. It’s pigs and lipstick. 

But the idolization of branding and the hegemony of marketing departments is also a broader problem in our society. With apologies to Andre Agassi image is not everything. In fact, it’s not anything.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Wall Street Journal:

While all U.S. taxpayers can make donations and claim the credit, the money can only be disbursed in a state where the Governor has granted permission. Gov. Evers says no, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that joining the federal program would be “catastrophic” for public schools. He added ”We have plenty of voucher schools. We don’t need voucher money.”

Wisconsin parents might disagree. School choice is popular in Wisconsin but the state’s current program is 300% of the federal poverty line in Milwaukee and Racine and 220% in the statewide program. The federal tax credits expand educational resources at no cost to state budgets. Low-income families that keep their children in public schools could see the money used for tutoring or special needs.

Ryan Raiche:

Hefty bonuses, monthly car allowances, and what in the world is longevity pay?

As many school districts face budget cuts and consider new tax levies, 5 INVESTIGATES reviewed the contracts for every superintendent at the 30 largest school districts in the state.

The contracts are not readily available. All of them require a public records request — and in some cases even cash — to obtain.

The documents reveal eye-popping perks, monthly stipends, allowances, and a handful of creative ways to describe what most people know as a “bonus.”

“The compensation question is important. It’s a fair question,” said Dr. Deb Henton, a former school superintendent and the current executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators.

Denise Robbins:

In the book, Szetela examines how well-intentioned efforts to diversify literature have triggered a wave of censorship, from mandatory sensitivity reads to morality clauses and social media–driven book cancellations, creating a chilling effect across publishing.

The inciting incident was the controversy about Chinese author Amélie Wen Zhao, whose young adult novel was criticized for its depiction of slavery. (She canceled publication and then un-canceled it, saying it was true to her cultural perspective of human trafficking across Asia.) 

One of her critics was an author and sensitivity reader named Kosoko Jackson, who, shortly after, tried to publish a YA novel about the Kosovo war, only to have his own book withdrawn by his publisher. 

“It was like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ satire of wokeness,” Szetela said. “If this is what I’m seeing as someone who doesn’t work in publishing, what was it like behind closed doors? In terms of acquisitions, in terms of editing?” 

Szetela will discuss his book at a talk at the UW Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy on Monday, Sept. 22. Recently, the Cap Times sat down with Szetela to talk about his work at Mother Fool’s Coffeehouse. 

Chris Rickert:

Board member Savion Castro said most school boards are structured for “older, whiter, wealthier folks,” but that’s not an accurate reflection of the Madison district’s diverse student body, and increasing pay could make board positions “more accessible to the folks that look like the students and the families of the district.”

Four of the current board’s seven members are people of color, and two identify as having disabilities.

Also under the new compensation plan, the board president would be paid an additional $1,200 annually, and the board vice president and Instruction and Operations workgroup chairs an additional $600 annually. The board president currently makes $8,300 a year.

Members would also get $100 each for attending and participating in half-day board retreats and $200 for attending and participating in full-day retreats

According to research by district administration, Milwaukee School Board members make $18,121, Kenosha members make $6,500, Green Bay members make $7,538.40 and Racine members make $3,600. The Madison School District, with about 25,500 students, is the second-largest district in the state.

Milwaukee is the only Wisconsin school district that makes its board members eligible for district health insurance. If Madison becomes the second, according to the district’s legal office, members who enroll in district-provided health care would be advised not to participate in discussions or vote on district employee health insurance matters, but they could vote on overall budgets that include health insurance provisions.

Making Madison board members eligible for health and dental coverage is estimated to cost the district about $194,600 annually, if all seven members opt for it. The additional pay is expected to cost $60,100 annually.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Corrinne Hess:

“Reading proficiency among kindergarten through third grade students is unacceptably low, and that reality carries long-term consequences for the future of our youth and our city,” said longtime educator Howard Fuller. “The solution is clear and evidence based. Research shows that when early grade educators receive high-quality, science-based reading instruction training and coaching, student outcomes can improve dramatically.”

Fuller is co-chairing the coalition along with JoAnne Anton of Herb Kohl Philanthropies and former MPS board member Mark Sain. 

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Erkmen G. Aslim, Wei Fu, Caitlin K. Myers, Erdal Tekin & Bingjin Xue

We study how abortion access affects economic hardship and crime. Using a database of abortion provider locations and operations in Texas from 2009–2019, we exploit variation in travel distance to the nearest facility created by clinic closures following the enforcement of Texas HB-2 in 2013. We confirm previous evidence that increased distance to the nearest abortion facility reduces abortions and increases births. We provide novel evidence that reduced access to abortion also leads to significant economic hardship, reflected in lower labor force participation, rising debt, widening income inequality, and heightened housing insecurity. This financial strain translates into higher rates of financially motivated crime, such as theft and burglary, with no significant effect on violent crime. These effects extend beyond directly affected individuals, reflecting intrahousehold spillovers. These findings suggest far-reaching consequences of restricted access to reproductive healthcare.

Quinton Klabon:

Good news: at 801,207, Wisconsin beat @AppliedPopLab’s 2025 estimate.
Bad news: the baby bust is here.
2030: -61,371/-7.7%
2035: -118,613/-14.8%

Karen Vaites:

Collectively, they aren’t (yet) topping the nation for overall reading proficiency, although Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana have moved into the top tier; they are tied for 14th in 4th grade reading proficiency. Instead, they compel attention because they are producing the clearest gains over the last 5 years, as other states backslide.

The Southern Surge shares a common playbook. All four states made a multilayered, sustained investment in both teacher training and curriculum improvement, alongside other reforms.

Together, these states send a clear signal that we can absolutely raise reading outcomes with the right investments, and they offer a blueprint to other states.

Let’s discuss the sources of the Southern Surge.

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Christa Deneault & Evan Riehl:

We provide a comprehensive analysis of a Texas policy that relaxed teacher licensing requirements and created a large for-profit training industry. Using detailed administrative data, we show that for-profit-trained teachers have higher turnover and lower value-added than standard-trained teachers. But the policy significantly increased the supply of certified teachers, reducing schools’ reliance on uncertified teachers with even worse outcomes. Exploiting variation in policy exposure across schools, we find a zero net impact on student achievement due to these offsetting forces. Thus lower licensing requirements improved access to teaching and reduced training costs without harming students.

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Chris Rickert:

In their July working paper, researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research pointed to four main reasons district administrators have forgone performance pay:

• It led to “discontent” among staff.
• Principals were unable or unwilling to make performance distinctions among teachers.
• Performance pay systems were too complex and required too much effort to administer.
• Perceptions among school staff that more flexibility in pay led to inequities among teachers.

“Almost all the districts that experimented with using teacher performance as more than a minimal requirement for pay progression or bonuses have abandoned this approach,” the paper reports.

The 2011 law known as Act 10 that largely gutted most union rights for most public-sector workers made it possible for school districts to experiment with more flexible salary systems, and the goal of the WCER study was to see if any of the 25 districts that had made changes to their pay systems as of 2014 still maintained those changes 10 years later, in 2024.

Researchers obtained information from 24 of the 25 districts studied in 2014 and found that most of them had largely reverted to the step-and-lane system. This is despite some evidence in the education research literature that “flexible pay has potential benefits in terms of both teacher retention and student performance.”

…….

Researchers did not look at the state’s two largest school districts — Milwaukee and Madison — noting that they “appear to have made only minor changes in the traditional (compensation) schedule after Act 10.”

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When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

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Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Our metastatic government and irresponsible fiscal policies exacerbate this. Soon, most U.S. expenditure will go to servicing debt, and we lack the political mechanisms to correct this. Worse, we now depend on foreigners or local retirees to buy our debt. Former President Biden’s policies, like freezing assets in U.S. dollars, discouraged investment in U.S.-denominated assets. If your assets can be frozen because you once met someone who had lunch with the brother-in-law of a banker connected to Putin, why take the risk of holding dollars?

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At the Tandon School of Engineering of NYU, where I spent more than fifteen years, the near-totality of both faculty and graduate students were foreign-born

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V. THE LIBERATING EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The next point is an optimistic one: social media has transformed information flow. Historically, people traded information at the barber shop or fish market, acting as both conveyors and recipients. Big media disrupted this, turning us into passive consumers of TV lectures by the state and a bowdlerized press. Now, platforms like TikTok and X allow us to both share and receive information, returning to a natural model.

Social media is hard to control, even with censorship, and AI makes it even harder to manipulate without producing incoherent outcomes. For example, an ethnic cleansing in Gaza might have been covered up by traditional media in 1995, but in 2025, social media exposes it. The media only matters to politicians or those out of touch — anyone under 30 doesn’t care about ABC News.

Niansi Ye, Ling Peng, Bei Deng, Hui Hu, Yuncui Wang, Taoyun Zheng, Yating Ai, Xueting Liu, Shi Zhou & Yucan Li:

Psychological problems such as depression and anxiety increase the risk of cognitive impairment in older adults. But mechanisms on the effect of psychological disorder on cognitive function is inconclusive. Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment. RNT may increase the risk of cognitive impairment. However, there are fewer studies related to RNT and cognitive function, and there is a lack of epidemiological studies to explore the relationship between RNT and cognitive function.

Molly Gorman

Divorce in later life is becoming more common – and scientists are beginning to explore the surprisingly deep impact this can have on adult children and their relationships.

Divorce is greying.

The US has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, even though over the past four decades, it has fallen among younger couples. Instead, middle-aged and older adults have taken over. In fact, adults aged 65 and older are now the only age group in the US with a growing divorce rate. For the over-50s, the rate also rose for decades, but has now stabilised.  

Today, roughly 36% of people getting divorced are 50 and older, compared to only 8.7% in 1990. This is known as a “grey divorce”.

This tilt towards later-in-life divorce is happening for a mix of reasons, studies suggest. Lives are longer than they used to be, for a start, and older couples may be less willing to put up with unfulfilling marriagesthan before. Meanwhile, young people are getting married later and have become more selective when choosing a partner. As one researcher puts it, “the United States is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer and more stable than it was in the past

David Clarey Cleo Krejci :

Since taking over the district, Cassellius has repeatedly decried the devastating effects of gun violence on students and teachers. She has urged everyone from the mayor on down to take action. Her students are not dying at school, but in acts of community violence, and most shootings occurred outside school hours.

Efforts to address the violence do exist, spanning from prevention to enforcement. Each summer, hundreds of young people participate in summer camps, city-organized job placements and other prevention programs.

The goals often overlap: Give kids and teens a safe space after school. Connect them with mentors. Teach conflict resolution. Show them pathways into jobs and education.

Still, young people in Milwaukee continue to get shot and killed.

And as a new school year begins, everyone agrees: That should be unacceptable.

By Rose Horowitch:

The problem is that students are terrible judges of who’s a good teacher. Because learning is not always pleasant, they end up punishing teachers who teach the most and rewarding the instructors who challenge them the least. An extensive body of research shows no correlation—or even a negative correlation—between how students do on objective learning assessments and how they score their professors. One experiment found that Harvard physics students learned more from “active learning” instruction but thought they learned more by passively listening to a lecture. Another study demonstrated that Air Force Academy students who were taught by highly rated professors tended to do worse in subsequent classes.

Evaluations are also vulnerable to just about every bias imaginable. Course-evaluation scores are correlated with students’ expected grades. Studies have found that, among other things, students score male professors higher than female ones, rate attractive teachers more highly, and reward instructors who bring in cookies. “It’s not clear what the evaluations are measuring, but in some sense they’re a better instrument for measuring gender or grade expectations than they are for measuring the instructor’s actual value added,” Philip Stark, a UC Berkeley statistics professor who has studied the efficacy of teacher evaluations, told me.

Santiago Cueto, ……

Developing countries have made large investments in expanding access to technology with the aim of improving children’s educational outcomes. Notwithstanding these substantial public and private investments, the evidence on their educational impacts has been ambiguous with a mix of positive effects (Muralidharan et al. 2019, Araya et al. 2019), null effects (Beuermann et al. 2015, Piper et al. 2016), and even negative effects (Linden 2008, Malamud and Pop-Eleches 2011).[1]However, with a few notable exceptions (Lakdawala et al. 2023, Yanguas 2020) most of the evidence is based on short-term estimates.

One highly publicised initiative that provided personal laptops to students in developing countries was the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) programme, which was implemented in over 40 countries. A large-scale experimental evaluation of the OLPC programme in Peru found no effects on academic achievement or enrolment in primary school after 15 months of programme implementation (Cristia et al. 2017). Here, we report on an experimental study that builds on this earlier work by examining the long-term effects of the OLPC programme in Peru (Cueto et al. 2024). To do this, we utilised a range of administrative and survey data to follow a new sample of students in 531 schools over 10 years.

Despite the absence of impacts on short-term academic achievement, expanding access to technology in schools could generate impacts on longer-term outcomes along two separate dimensions. On the one hand, there may be long-term effects on schools if teachers and principals need time to learn how to use technology effectively for pedagogical purposes.[2] On the other hand, there could be long-term effects on students as they progress through the educational system. Greater exposure to computers could lead to changes in students’ attitudes, behaviours, and a broad range of skills with larger effects on later educational outcomes. Thus, in this study, we examine the long-term effects of expanding school access to technology on both the academic performance of schools over time and students’ educational trajectories as they progress from primary to tertiary education.

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more.

James Fallows:

This is a subject I know something about, having once been the editor of US News and having tried, with limited success, to clean up the ranking system.

-It’s a subject I care about, having heard so often from so many people about the distorting effects of trying to move “up” and “down” on these capricious measures. And it’s one I’ve written about regularly at this time of year, for instance in 2021, 2023, and 2024.²

-It’s timely subject, with the annual US News rankings coming out soon. 

-And it’s a frontier on which I think there’s hope, based on a different approach to rankings now. 

That promising approach is one honed over the past 20 years by The Washington Monthly, the publication on which I began my magazine career in the early 1970s. The magazine has taken an important step forward this year.

Background: How we got here. 

I don’t often say, “There’s an article from a small magazine, back in 2001, that explains our whole problem these days.” But I’ll say it in this case. 

Back in 2001, in The Washington Monthly, Amy Graham, whom I had worked with at US News, and Nicholas Thompson, whom I met in that era (when he was a college student) and who is now CEO of The Atlantic and author of a forthcoming book, together wrote “Broken Ranks,” a seminal piece that laid out the problem with rankings. The fundamental issue is that rankings mostly measure input, or what the colleges have, rather than output, or what the colleges do. As Graham and Thompson put it:

Ilka Agricola, Lynn Heller, Wil Schilders, Moritz Schubotz, Peter Taylor, Luis Vega

This report is the first of two publications of a joint Working Group of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM). In it, we shall analyze the current state of publishing in the mathematical sciences and explain the resulting problems. Our second publication will offer concrete recommendations, guidelines, and best practices for researchers, policymakers, and evaluators of mathematical research. It will explain how to detect and counteract attempts to game bibliometric measures, empowering the community to reclaim control over research evaluation and drive necessary change.

Wall Street Journal:

In all three exams, students scored on average lower than on the most recent exam in 2019. Reading scores were about 10 points lower than when the exam was first administered in 1992. Declines were bigger among students who were lower performers, causing achievement gaps to grow. One silver lining: Scores at charter schools mostly didn’t fall.

Only about a third of high school seniors are prepared for college in either reading or math, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Colleges are adding introductory courses to teach what students should have learned in high school. Even Harvard teaches basic algebra.

The latest NAEP report tracks with the fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores released in January, which showed test scores have continued to decline since 2022. While schools nationwide have received hundreds of billions of dollars from the feds and states to address pandemic learning loss, a record number of eighth-graders can’t read.

High school seniors tested last year entered high school in 2020 and no doubt were harmed by school shutdowns. But reading and math scores have been sliding since 2013. One problem is the lowering of academic standards for students. Harvard’s Tom Kane tells us one culprit is “reduced accountability.”

Dake Kang and Yael Grauer:

Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.

Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang — targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them.

By Jessica Gould, Brittany Kriegstein, James Ramsay and Verónica Del Valle:

Jon Brodkin:

Until 2019, Verizon “ran a ‘location-based services’ program that sold access to certain kinds of wireless customer location data,” the ruling said. “As part of that program, Verizon contracted with ‘location information aggregators,’ which collected customer data and resold it to third-party location-based services providers. Verizon had arrangements with two aggregators, LocationSmart and Zumigo, which in turn contracted with 63 third-party entities.”

Instead of providing notice to customers and obtaining or verifying customer consent itself, Verizon “largely delegated those functions via contract,” the court said. This system and its shortcomings were revealed in 2018 when “the New York Times published an article reporting security breaches involving Verizon’s (and other major carriers’) location-based services program,” the court said.

Securus Technologies, a provider of communications services to correctional facilities, “was misusing the program to enable law enforcement officers to access location data without customers’ knowledge or consent, so long as the officers uploaded a warrant or some other legal authorization,” the ruling said. A Missouri sheriff “was able to access customer data with no legal process at all” because Securus did not review the documents that law enforcement uploaded.

Sara Randazzo, Caitlin Ostroff and Shane Shifflett:

Scientists are removing words like “diverse” and “disparities” from hundreds of federal grant renewals to avoid getting flagged in the Trump administration’s focus on eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.

At least 600 research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health have been modified in the fiscal year starting in October to remove terms associated with diversity, equity and inclusion, the Journal analysis found. Nearly all of those projects were multiyear grants that had already been approved but were up for routine annual reviews. The modified grants were worth $480 million this cycle.

The most frequently deleted term was “diverse,” removed in 300 instances, followed by “underrepresented.”

In some cases, scientists are yanking words that aren’t DEI-related at all, but could be flagged as such, including references to “discrimination” of antibodies in transplant patients.

WisPolitics:

Milwaukee voters in April 2024 approved a referendum to allow MPS to increase its revenue limits by $252 million over four years after the district warned it faced a $200 million shortfall for the 2024-25 fiscal year.

Cassellius said she spent the summer ensuring all 50 of the district’s schools built before 1950 were cleared of lead issues, which the district announced Friday.

The district recently recouped roughly $33 million from the Department of Public Instruction after a financial crisis led to missed deadlines and accounting errors.

“We have been working on three streams of work at our finance division,” Cassellius said. “The first was just to finish that funding year ’24 audit. We were behind on that. We were missing deadlines.

Alex Tabarrok:

British taxpayers shouldered an enormous military and financial burden to eliminate slavery, reflecting a generosity of spirit and a sincere attempt to address a moral wrong—an act of atonement that stands as one of the most unusual and significant in history.

Erin Gretzinger

Last school year, district administrators said, elementary schools experienced stable or decreasing scores in literacy and math, while attendance improved. Middle schools improved across the board. High schools had mixed results in literacy and math scores, with decreases in attendance and graduation rates.

District administrators told School Board members they are evaluating last year’s data and may recalibrate their 2027 goals. Cindy Green, the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, said the school district will report back to the board this fall about how last year’s results factor into future targets.

“In terms of some of our lagging indicators … we have a lot of room to improve,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said at the meeting. “But the celebration is that there are some schools in there that are beating the odds.” 

——-

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Thomas S. Dee

To realize this potential, we must first confront an important but uncomfortable truth. The robust links that should connect education research, policy, and practice are too often broken or simply nonexistent. The implications of this systems-level failure are apparent: Key indicators of student learning have been in decline—particularly among our most vulnerable students—for over a decade.

——

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Brian Potter:

Because of these difficulties, the gaseous diffusion plant didn’t begin operating until February of 1945. While the plant was originally planned to produce uranium to the roughly 90% U235 enrichment needed to build a bomb, it was discovered that beyond 36.6% enrichment, different types of barrier and different types of pumps being designed would be required. In the latter half of 1943 the plant was thus redesigned to produce 36.6% enriched uranium (using 2892 diffusion stages) that would then be fed into the electromagnetic process. By the end of the war, the gaseous diffusion plant had “contributed substantially to the manufacture of the fissionable material used in the fabrication of atomic weapons”, and would become the primary method of producing enriched uranium in the early post-war years.

In addition to the electromagnetic and gaseous diffusion separation processes, a plant to separate U235 by liquid thermal diffusion was also built. Thermal diffusion had been considered by the Manhattan Project early on, but it appeared insufficiently promising and there were no initial plans to build a thermal diffusion plant. However, work on the process continued by the Navy as a method of producing fissile material for nuclear reactors. By late 1942, it appeared much more promising as a feasible separation method, and Leslie Groves recommended that it continue to be developed by the Navy. Eventually, in June of 1944 it was decided to build a thermal diffusion plant at Oak Ridge to produce partially-enriched uranium as an input to the electromagnetic separation process, as doing so would speed up overall U235 production. The plant came online in late 1944.

Chris Rickert:

The School Board did not have any formal say in the decision, and two of the seven board members, Nicki Vander Meulen and Martha Siravo, have criticized administrators for not providing them with enough information about the issue. Vander Meulen has come out in favor of weighted grading, while Siravo said she did not have enough information to have a position.

Vander Meulen was the only board member to respond Thursday to a request for comment on the survey results. She reiterated that she had asked for information about the issue for “months” but was “repeatedly told this isn’t a Board decision.”

About 14% of family members and 11% of students were opposed to weighted grading, according to the survey results. About 17% of students and about 16% of family members were “neutral” on the question of whether to shift to weighted grading.

By contrast, a small plurality — or about 41% — of staff who filled out the survey said they opposed a shift to weighted grading. About 36% said they were in favor, and the rest were neutral.

——

Notes on the Taxpayer Funded Madison School District’s Grading Policies.

John Kass:

As I’ve written and reported before, Illinois kids can’t read or do math at grade level, and it’s getting worse. Again, all those kids are ready for under Pritzker is prison or a lifetime on welfare. And taxpayers flee.

Pritzker has billions to spend on himself. And many of us have become sickened by what Pritzker and the Democrats–and oily combine Republicans and their press agents–have done.

Many have left, yes, and I’m one of them. But our sons still live in Illinois and the young women they love. And nothing is ever written and inevitable. We can change destiny.

But it takes clear headed thinking, courage, and your votes.

Ben Burgis & Meagan Day

…. whether in the form of state crackdowns on dissent or lone-wolf assassinations of leaders, undermines a principle that democratic socialists have always held dear.

Furthermore, the prospect of a descent into tit-for-tat political violence is an ominous development that threatens to narrow the space for meaningful political action. This augurs poorly for the political culture writ large, and in particular for the Left. We say things that others find extremely objectionable all the time, and we expect to be met with strenuous counterargument — not violent reprisal. While political violence has always existed around the fringes, this has mostly proven to be a reasonable expectation. It seems we have been living through a fragile consensus: in our otherwise extraordinarily violent culture, political leaders and commentators went mostly unharmed. Now the consensus appears to be unraveling, with chilling implications.

Attempted and successful assassinations of political leaders are on the rise, as are politically motivated killings of less notable people. While this type of violence originatesfrom all across the political spectrum, the Right has been responsible for vastly more of it than the Left for several decades. In the last few years, assailants increasingly seem to hail from the politically muddled, mentally disturbed, and heavily armed elements of the American populace whose general paranoia and disorientation have become enmeshed with an incoherently but viciously polarized political culture. Even garden-variety American mass gun violence has an increasingly political valence to it; where the school shooters of old were given to a kind of totalizing, depoliticized nihilism, today they scrawl contradictory political slogans on their weapons.

The killing of Charlie Kirk already seems further proof that America’s violent mania is colliding head-on with our political culture’s dehumanizing tribalism. This toxic combination threatens to badly corrode democratic norms and extinguish any hope of left-wing progress.

More:

“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.

Eric Kaufman:

These results echo findings reported last month by John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times, showing a rising fertility gap between young progressives and conservatives in rich countries. The difference was modest before 1990, but has widened to 0.6 of a child in America and 0.4 of a child across these advanced societies. In a similar vein, since 2010 the fertility gap between religious and non-religious women under 45 has increased considerably. American women who attend church regularly now have almost one more child, on average, than those with no religious affiliation.

Might we go further and identify the rise of “woke” politics — equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for women and minorities — as a factor in the post-2010 decline in fertility in the Anglosphere and Scandinavia? Second-wave feminism argued that the institution of the family oppressed women and reproduced the patriarchy. Some called for sisterhood and political lesbianism. Social media allowed these radical ideas to flow off campus into mainstream media and youth culture. Radical feminism was a key component of the “Great Awokening” alongside critical race and gender ideology, and reached fever pitch in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement.

The share of women under 30 identifying as bisexual soared in this period: in the American General Social Survey (GSS), it leapt from under 5% in 2010 to over 25% in 2022. According to Gallup, 31% of Generation Z women now identify as LGBT. In the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) student surveys, non-heterosexual identification is strongly linked to identifying as very liberal. Even controlling for ideology, non-heterosexuality is connected to progressive views such as endorsing the shouting down of offensive speakers on campus.

Jason L. Riley:

Mr. Washington plays David King, a swaggering music executive and founder of a record label now in decline. King becomes entangled in a kidnapping plot when his chauffeur’s teenage son, having been mistaken for King’s son, is abducted by an aspiring rapper named Yung Felon and held for ransom. On its surface the movie is a police procedural. Yet it doubles as an engaging meditation on some of the best and worst aspects of black culture and the importance of father-son relationships.

William Geotzmann:

But people don’t perceive that bubbles occur that infrequently. In research I’ve done with Robert Shiller and Dasol Kim, we conducted monthly surveys of U.S. investors over the past 25 years, asking about potential market crashes. Typically, they put the odds of a catastrophic crash in the next six months at 10% to 20%—much greater than history suggests. (Granted, the financial crisis of 2008-09 happened during our sample period and understandably terrified most savers.)

There have been a few seemingly catastrophic days when the market dropped precipitously. But not as many as you might think. Since 1887, there have been just four cases where the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped by more than 10% in a single day—and two of those were during the big crash of 1929.

Lydia Saad:

All major subgroups of Americans express less support for higher education today than they did 12 years ago. The initial decline — between 2013 and 2019 — in the percentage rating college as very important was steeper among 18- to 34-year-olds than among older adults. However, since then, the rates among older adults have plunged, so that now only about a third of all age groups say a college education is very important.

Women, people of color, college graduates and Democrats have traditionally been more likely than their counterparts to value higher education, and that remains the case today. However, even among these pro-college groups, less than half now say college is very important.

Chris Rickert:

Fieldtrip entered into a $99,880 contract with the district last year to do the work, including research, strategy, messaging and planning.

——-

School logo updates.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Zoomhoot:

On August 28, 2025, Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the fourth-largest school district in the US, passed a $10.2 billion budget and is facing a $743 million deficit. Prior to the budget passage, the big three credit rating agencies each rated CPS General Obligation (GO) Bonds “non-investment grade speculative,” also known by the more pejorative title “junk bonds.” CPS bonds received a Ba1 rating from Moody’s and a BB+ rating from both S&P Global and Fitch Ratings.

More.

Marco Giovanni Nieddu, Roberto Nisticò, Federico II, and IZALorenzo Pandolfi:

This paper examines how publication-based tenure-track systems affect the careers of Ph.D. graduates in Economics. We leverage a 2010 reform in Italy that replaced open-ended assistant professor (AP) positions with fixed-term contracts and introduced publication minimum requirements for career advancement. Using survey and administrative data,
along with a Difference-in-Differences Event-Study approach comparing Economics to less academically-oriented fields, we find that the reform significantly reduced the likelihood of Economics Ph.D. graduates entering academia in Italy, while increasing transitions to academic careers abroad or to public and private sector jobs. Talented graduates were disproportionately affected, revealing negative selection into Italian academia following the removal of permanent AP positions. Despite these trends, tenure-track hires tend to publish more in high-ranking journals, suggesting that the reform’s incentive effects may partly mitigate its negative selection effects.

Liam Beran:

Eighty-two academic programs within the Universities of Wisconsin have been suspended or eliminated since 2022, according to records obtained by Isthmus in an open records request. A majority of those cuts were in the humanities or social sciences, according to an Isthmus analysis of the records.

Individual campuses recommend their own program suspensions and eliminations. This is often done when programs have low enrollments of students or when universities restructure academic divisions. Suspended programs stop enrolling new students and can be eliminated or reinstated within five years of being suspended, according to UW system policy. Eliminated programs cannot be reinstated without approval from the UW Board of Regents.

There is no universal classification scheme for academic disciplines. Isthmus employed the classifications used in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ “Humanities Indicators” project, a widely respected source for data related to humanities programs, to determine which category a suspended or eliminated program would fall under.

According to the records received, the UW system has since replaced 14 of the 82 programs. A number of programs related to animal science at UW-Madison, for example, were replaced with similar programs after the Departments of Dairy Science and Animal Sciences merged in 2020.

Cleo Krejci

Jill Underly, the top DPI official, finalized those changes Sept. 3. They will be applied to 2024-25 state report card data, which will be released in November.

“Just as you wouldn’t rely on a decade-old GPS to find your way today, we can’t use outdated performance benchmarks to guide school improvement,” Underly said in an Aug. 15 statement. “Students are learning in new, dynamic ways, and accountability systems must keep pace. Innovation in education means we transform how we measure success.”

Criticisms have continued past spring legislative session

As DPI finalizes changes from this summer, it continues to face criticism that it’s made three changes to cut scores since 2020.

Last spring, Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would have forced DPI to revert Forward Exam cut scores to those in place in 2019-20. After the measure passed along party lines, Gov. Tony Evers ultimately vetoed the bill in March, saying that although he’s been critical of DPI’s approach, he took issue with lawmakers’ attempts to “undermine” the state agency’s independence and authority.

Among the most vocal critics to the changes is the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a law firm often aligned with conservative politics. It has released several statements, and analyses, that are critical of DPI.

This fall, a group of school board officials and current or former superintendents is trying a new approach: getting school boards to pass resolutions saying report card changes “make it impossible to meaningfully compare data from year to year.”

“Frequent and arbitrary changes are not only making it impossible for school leaders to understand and track school performance, the changes themselves are doing a disservice to students by cloaking lackluster academic performance data with other metrics,” reads a statement from the Wisconsin School Leaders for Excellence, which formed in January.

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Corrinne Hess:

This year’s enrollment is 164,340 across the UW system, according to preliminary estimates released Tuesday. That’s down 96 students from the final 2024 fall enrollment counts. 

UW system officials wouldn’t quantify the “significant declines” in international students, but international enrollment could drop as much as 15 percent at colleges nationwide, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

Kat Rosenfield:

The video of Iryna Zarutska’s final moments on that North Carolina train is like something out of a horror movie—not because of the terrible way it ends, but because of how it begins.

Shot from overhead inside the fluorescent-lit interior of a Lynx light rail car in Charlotte, North Carolina, the footage silently tracks the arrival of a slender young woman in glasses and khakis, her hair tucked up under the uniform cap of a local pizzeria. She enters the train, her eyes on the phone in her hand rather than the environment around her; she barely looks up as she drops into an empty seat.

If this were a horror film, this is the moment when the audience would sit up and start shouting at the screen: Oh my god, stop! What are you doing? Don’t sit there!

Because there’s someone else in this shot, sitting in the seat just behind the one the young woman has taken. It is a man whose attire, whose posture, whose mannerisms, and whose mere presence on public transit in this U.S. city at that time of night all signal that he is someone from whom you should keep your distance. Someone you should watch out for even as you pretend not to notice him, and certainly not someone you want to turn your back on.

Sabine Martin

Since the Universities of Wisconsin started shuttering two-year branch campuses in 2023 amid steep enrollment declines, counties that own the buildings and land have been left to regroup and decide what’s next for the properties.

Meanwhile, they’re on the hook for maintaining what they still own. At a cost of thousands of dollars each month, that adds an urgency to counties’ efforts to redevelop the former campuses.

“We do not have the funds to sustain this on an ongoing basis,” Richland County Board Chair David Turk said of the former UW-Platteville Richland campus.

Each county that had a UW branch campus that has since closed is eligible for a grant of up to $2 million to redevelop the property under a state law.

Paul Tough

What Williams wanted in her classroom was diversity. That is a controversial notion in public education these days, when the federal government is threatening to withhold funds from school systems and colleges that make it a priority. But Williams’s desire wasn’t a political matter. To her, it simply made practical sense. Whether they were rich or poor, her students were going to grow up in a country defined by its diversity, and she didn’t want to teach them in an environment marked by its absence.

So in the spring of 2023, Williams applied for a job at another Dallas Independent School District campus, the experimental Solar Preparatory School for Girls. By design, half of Solar Prep’s students come from families who are economically disadvantaged and half from households with higher incomes. The wealthier group includes plenty of middle-class kids but also many girls whose parents could afford one of Dallas’s tonier private schools but choose instead to send their daughters to Solar Prep.

I met Williams on a warm morning at a community event in the Oak Cliff section of South Dallas. She was wearing a purple Solar Prep T-shirt and standing behind a table that the school’s PTA had set up to recruit prospective students. When we spoke, her enthusiasm came out in a joyful rush. “The inspiration that I experience every day through my girls is something that I wish every teacher in the United States could experience,” she told me. “It’s literally love overflowing.”

Brendan Harley:

In the classroom, I help students learn how, not what, to think. We live in an age where mountains of information are available. The trick is knowing what to do with that information — how to navigate what is known and, more important, how to deal with what is uncertain.

I also run a tissue engineering research lab. Undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral associates (those who have already received a doctorate) work together in teams to develop new biomedical technologies. It is essential young researchers learn how to identify a problem, develop strategies to address it, build teams and assess how well they meet their goals, and overcome failures along the way.

Instead of learning to match patterns, young researchers must learn how to illuminate new spaces and create entirely new connections. And because we work at the edge of what is known, our studies often take us in directions both surprising and entirely different from how we set off.

Wall Street Journal:

That’s essentially what Judge Allison Burroughs said in her 84-page opinion, which includes new details from legal discovery on how the Administration leveraged federal funds to try to control Harvard’s hiring, admissions and curriculum.

On April 3 the government sent Harvard a list of “pre-conditions” to continue receiving federal money. Harvard had a “choice”—the Administration’s euphemism for its ultimatum—between installing “new leadership in problematic depts” and “receivership.” The government also sought a first lien on all Harvard assets “as collateral” in the event that Harvard failed to comply with its demands.

A week later the Administration detailed further conditions. The government told Harvard to do an external audit of “viewpoint diversity” in “each department, field, or teaching unit.” To provide ill-defined balance, it demanded that the school hire “a critical mass of new faculty” and admit “a critical mass of students.” When Harvard refused, the Administration froze the $2.2 billion in funds.

The Administration cited federal regulations that let the government terminate a grant if it “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” This was a switcheroo, according to the judge, because officials earlier had claimed authority to end the grants because Harvard allegedly broke the Civil Rights Act by tolerating antisemitism on campus.

Sabine Martin

It remains unclear why Ford is stepping into Ploeger’s job during the first week of the new school year and if it’s related to the ongoing investigation.

“We are confident in the ability of Mr. Ford and the administrative team to lead our school and ensure a smooth continuation of learning and support for our students,” the district’s top leaders wrote to parents.

The Sun Prairie School District did not respond to the Wisconsin State Journal’s request for clarification regarding the leadership change.

Matt Barnum:

“Students are taking their next steps in life with fewer skills and less knowledge in core academics than their predecessors a decade ago,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the board that oversees the tests. “This is happening at a time when rapid advancements in technology and society demand more of future workers and citizens, not less.”

The 12th-grade scores come with an important asterisk. It is possible that progress is being obscured by rising high-school graduation rates, which could mean that more lower-performing students are taking the exams. It also is unclear whether there has been any recovery in the time since these tests were administered, more than a year and a half ago.

In reading, two-thirds of seniors could determine the purpose of a persuasive essay, but only one in five was able to draw a conclusion from such an essay, supported by the text.

In math, 60% of students deduced the population of an area using information on size and density, while just under half correctly turned a real-world scenario into an algebraic expression.

Students who were already struggling tended to fall further behind, creating an even wider gap between the top and bottom. Girls’ scores, on average, dropped faster than boys’. Both trends have shown up on other assessments.

More from Laura Meckler.

—-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Mike Solana:

topics including: our full summer of gnarly ass violence, the center lib’s dangerous dance with mamdani, left wing values in conflict that doom this thing to failure, and what it took men like FDR to succeed (tldr it wasn’t democracy). full piece:

The Abundance Delusion.

Steve Kornacki summary:

So, here are the gaps for men and women. For men:

Having children – +25% Trump voters
Being married – +18% Trump voters
Being grounded spiritually – +16% Trump voters
Owning own home – +8% Trump voters
Having no debt – +5% Trump voters
Financial independence – +4% Trump voters
Making family/community proud – +1% Trump voters
Able to retire early – +1% Trump voters
Having money to do things you want – +14% Harris voters
Using talents & resources to help others – +19% Harris voters
Having emotional stability – +20 Harris voters
Fulfilling job/career – +24% Harris voters

For women:

Having children – +20% Trump voters
Being grounded spiritually – +18% Trump voters
Being married – +14% Trump voters
Owning own home – +10% Trump voters
Financial independence – +8% Trump voters
Able to retire early – +3% Trump voters
Having no debt – +2% Trump voters
Making family/community proud – +5% Harris voters
Using talents & resources to help others – +15% Harris voters
Having money to do things you want – +19% Harris voters
Fulfilling job/career – +19% Harris voters
Having emotional stability – +21 Harris voters

Glenn Reynolds:

Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was killed on a Charlotte commuter rail train by a crazed black man, Decarlos Brown, Jr. He sat down behind her, and then, for no obvious reason, pulled out a knife and began stabbing her in the throat. There was blood everywhere.

And there’s video, which the Charlotte town officials tried and failed to keep secret. But the national press is, as noted above, not simply downplaying it, but ignoring it.

They’re not even making excuses. They might say that violence on commuter trains isn’t news — though I don’t know if that’s true when you’re talking Charlotte instead of the Bronx. They might say that black on white violence isn’t news, though that’s kind of an iffy position. Everyone knows, and DOJ statistics demonstrate, that’s it’s much more common than white on black, but do they want to invoke that as a justification? Maybe they don’t want to encourage random violence by crazy people? But they cover that all the time.

The truth is, this story just hurts the narrative. The black-on-white angle hurts, but the real problem is that Decarlos Brown, Jr., is a repeat violent offender who has spun through the revolving door of the criminal justice system for years, a man with 14 arrests, many for violent crimes such as larceny, armed robbery, and violent threats. But despite being regularly arrested, he was repeatedly released.

Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles said that you can’t arrest your way out of these problems. Well, not if you keep letting people go, anyway:

——-

Charles Cooke:

Lyles was keen to propose that “we will never arrest our way out [of] issues such homelessness and mental health.” That’s nonsense. The guy who committed this crime had been arrested over and over and over again — including for assault, breaking and entering, robbery with a dangerous weapon, and communicating threats. He had resisted arrest. He had failed to appear in court. He had been caught multiple times in possession of a firearm — which his status as a felon prohibited. If, instead of being out on the streets, he had been in prison, this would not have happened. Or, to put it another way: If the authorities had done their jobs, they could absolutely have “arrested their way out of” this murder.

Heck, they’re doing it now! Per local news, the killer has been arrested and “charged with first-degree murder in connection to Zarutska’s death.” Why? Obviously, because, given his proclivities, it is understood that he must be kept away from the general public. So why not earlier? Surely it cannot be the case that we can arrest our way out of murders only after a murder has been committed? We have other laws in this country than those against murder — laws that are supposed to be enforced in their own right, and that, when enforced, often serve to nip would-be repeat-offenders in the bud. During her remarks, Lyles made sure to confirm that, “I am not villainizing those who struggle with their mental health or those who are unhoused.” But, of course, that’s not what she’s being asked to do. She’s being asked to villainize — or, if she can’t bring herself to make moral judgements, to ensure that the criminal justice systems deal with — people who have rap sheets that look like this:

——-

Ann Althouse summary:

I write, prompting ChatGPT to respond to the NY Post column with the headline, “Horrid video of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska’s slaughter on Charlotte train is met with deafening silence from Dem leaders, media.”

ChatGPT’s answer can be read here, where you will also see that prompt was my second prompt.

Court Filing:

The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline and Plaintiffs’ divestiture proposal would only accelerate that decline, harming publishers who currently rely on open-web display advertising revenue. As the law makes clear, the last thing a court should do is intervene to reshape an industry that is already in the midst of being reshaped by market forces.

David Blaska:

How surprised is anyone that the part-time Madison school board wants to nearly double its pay to $15,000 (from $8,000) AND claim generous health and dental insurance worth between $82,000 and $220,000? After hitting up us taxpayers for an extra $100 million for operations and another $500 million for buildings and grounds. In other words, the seven young progressives (none of them business people) want their cut! The Wisconsin State Journal gets it right:

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

James V. Shuls

How much are you willing to pay to find out what your local public school is teaching? On its face, the question sounds absurd. The cost of transparency should be zero.

When the Show-Me Institute launched the Curriculum Transparency project in 2022, which examined the extent of diversity, equity, and inclusion materials in schools, we sent out Sunshine requests to every school district in the state. In return, we received bills totaling nearly a million dollars ($908,192). For example, Lee’s Summit sought $40,609 to comply with our request.

Tim Daly:

Fast-forward to 2025. Public satisfaction with schools is the lowest ever recorded. In a recent Gallup survey, respondents were asked to name our nation’s most important problem. Three percentsaid education. Back in 2000, it was five times that many and education topped the list of concerns, beating out perennial hits like crime and taxes. 

During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris barely discussed education on the stump and were not asked about their plans in debates.3

Let’s face it: Education is an also-ran issue. Given that student outcomes are mired in a long depression, that’s worrisome. 

How did we get here?

Education’s run as a top public concern was relatively brief, as Rick Hess and others have pointed out. There are several possible explanations for its decline:

Shannon Bream:

Video

Pioneer Institute:

In this week’s episode of The Learning Curve, co-hosts U-Arkansas Prof. Albert Cheng and American Federation for Children Senior Fellow Shaka Mitchell interview John Kirtley, Managing Partner and co-founder of Keswick Partners, and founder and Chairman of Step Up for Students, a nonprofit that manages Florida’s state-funded K-12 scholarship programs serving over half a million students. Kirtley shares his journey from the private sector into education reform in the late 1990s, and why business leaders must actively engage in shaping K-12 policy. He reflects on Florida’s steady, incremental expansion of school choice programs, explaining how this long-term approach built a critical mass of school choice families despite longstanding opposition, and offers lessons for newer ESA states like Arizona, Texas, and Iowa that seek to accelerate growth. Mr. Kirtley addresses challenges ahead, from ensuring a strong supply of high-quality private schools to managing the complexities of universal ESA programs. He also discusses how to measure and maintain accountability in parent-driven school choice programs, strategies to reverse stagnating NAEP scores, and the opportunities presented by the new federal education tax credit program. Mr. Kirtley also asked that we share this compelling school choice video: Drop The Suit Rally in Tally 2016.

Wall Street Journal:

The tussle over democratic control of Virginia’s public universities is turning into a royal rumble. Last week a committee of the state Senate, controlled by Democrats, held a brief meeting to reject 14 of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s appointees to three college boards, on top of eight voted down in June. Republicans argue this action is a legal nullity. Next up, the state Supreme Court?

The president of the University of Virginia resigned recently under Trump Administration pressure over the school’s diversity initiatives. George Mason University (GMU) is under similar heat, after the Education Department found it was “illegally using race” in hiring. State Sen. Aaron Rouse, the Democratic committee chair, claims the moves from Washington aren’t about civil rights but “dismantling public education to advance a partisan agenda.”

Dismantling? Partisan agenda? If the rejections hold for Mr. Youngkin’s 22 picks, GMU will have 10 vacancies of 16 board seats, meaning it generally lacks a quorum to do business, though some governance decisions can be made by its executive committee.

The people voted down weren’t yahoos. At GMU, they include Charles Cooper, a prominent D.C. litigator, Maureen Ohlhausen, who sat on the Federal Trade Commission, and Will Moschella, former principal associate deputy attorney general. Democrats hope their gubernatorial nominee, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, wins in November so she can fill the openings instead.

Roland Fryer:

In 2012, my graduate student Will Dobbie and I collected unprecedented data from nearly 50 New York City charter schools to see which practices truly boosted student learning. Class size and teacher credentials—political obsessions for decades—mattered little. What mattered most were five concrete, replicable practices:

more instruction time,

high expectations,

frequent teacher feedback,

data-driven instruction and

high-dosage tutoring.

Together, these five tenets explained roughly half the difference between effective and ineffective schools.

Armed with that evidence, we searched for districts willing to test the model—from Haiti to Harlem. Most weren’t interested. But in Houston, superintendent Terry Grier opened the door. Together we applied the Five Tenets in 20 struggling public schools serving nearly 20,000 students. We lengthened the school year by 20%, brought in hundreds of tutors, replaced 95% of principals and half the teachers while retraining the rest, embedded data into instruction, and built a culture of high expectations. It was one of the most ambitious social experiments in American public education.

The results were astonishing. In elementary-school math, students gained the equivalent of four extra months of learning a year—enough to erase the racial achievement gap in less than two years if we implemented these practices in the lowest-performing half of schools nationwide. In secondary schools, where skeptics said reform was impossible, students gained nearly eight additional months of learning in a nine-month school year. These were bigger effects than those produced by the Harlem Children’s Zone. Bigger than Success Academy. Bigger than anything else I’ve seen in my career.

For context, cutting class size yields about three months of extra learning. Teach for America adds two months in math. Head Start delivers about two months in early literacy. The Houston schools doubled those gains—year after year. By the third year, elementary students had accumulated the equivalent of an extra academic year. In middle and high school, it was two. These weren’t “miracle kids” or “superhuman teachers.” The system—not the students—changed.

Math results were jaw-dropping, but reading proved stubborn. Gains were modest in elementary school and nearly zero in secondary school—mirroring what even the best charter schools have found nationwide.

Jordan Ramp:

You don’t see Fort Hancock coming—until you do. Traveling south along I-10 from El Paso, there are no welcome signs pointing toward the small West Texas town. But then, as you near the Mexican border, there’s that navy blue water tower emblazoned with text looming large against the horizon. “Fort Hancock Mustangs,” it reads. “6-Man State Football Champions.” The writing commemorates the local high school’s football program, which won Texas state titles in 1986 and again every year from 1988–1991.

The water tower is the best-kept structure for miles around; its preservation says a lot about the importance of the sport in an otherwise remote community. But last week, when Fort Hancock High School honored the one hundredth anniversary of its founding ahead of a football game against the visiting Fort Davis Indians, the celebration was less about the way things are than about the way they were thirty years ago, when the home team was winning. 

A lot has changed since that run of championships. The Mustangs’ currently own one of the longest losing streaks in the state; their last victory came in October of 2021. When they took the field to start their 2025 season, on August 29, they were chasing a simple goal: to live up to the legacy so vital to their town’s recent history. To win a single game. 

Ashanty Rosario:

AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable.

During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.

These incidents were jarring—not just because of the cheating, but because they made me realize how normalized these shortcuts have become.

Steve Contorno

The frustration is cutting across partisan lines. Last year, voters in nine states approved referendums to cap or curb rising assessments, from tying bills to inflation in Georgia to New Mexico and Colorado expanding tax exemptions for veterans who own homes there. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Texas, Indiana, New Jersey, New York and elsewhere have approved tens of billions of dollars in property tax relief over the past 18 months.

To some, though, such measures fall short. Grassroots campaigns in Michigan and Ohio are now gathering signatures for ballot initiatives that would abolish property taxes altogether. In Texas, Republican state Rep. Brian Harrison has proposed a state constitutional amendment to end them there by 2031.

“Never-ending property taxes are unethical, immoral and incompatible with private property rights,” Harrison said, “and need to be thrown to the ash heap of history.”

———

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Wall Street Journal:

By the way, Mr. Johnson’s appointees control the board 11-10. Its previous members resigned en masse in October, amid a showdown with the now-fired Chicago Public Schools Chief Pedro Martinez, who opposed the mayor’s last high-risk borrowing plan. That proposal failed, but Mr. Johnson stacked the board with new members whom he expected to get with the progressive program. Instead, the board has reached the same conclusion about Mr. Johnson’s reckless borrowing, and all the new board members elected by voters last fall voted no.

Everyone in Chicago knows his loan gambit would have made the fiscal problem worse for CPS, which is already under a pile of debt. When Mr. Johnson first floated the idea of short-term borrowing last year, an internal schools memo reported by Chalkbeat Chicago noted that taking out more loans would doom its already lousy bond rating.

“This could be thought of as putting your credit card payments that you can no longer afford on your mortgage payments,” the memo said. “It allows cash to be freed up for other expenses, but it seeds a costly legacy of future amounts of larger debt to be paid back and it does not solve the issue of being fiscally responsible.”

www:

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To begin, select a dojo and start training now!

Want to support an independent project built by the community, for the community, and help KanaDojo continue growing? Then please consider donating here – thank you!

Jon Hartley:

I’m working as a teaching assistant while studying for a doctorate in economics at Stanford, but a campus union is trying to get me fired. The Stanford Graduate Workers Union wants my head on a plate because I refused to sign a membership form and pay dues. I won’t fund an organization whose values and tactics I don’t support.

In June, the union began seeking to bar graduate students who refuse to pay dues or agency fees from working as teaching or research assistants. That threat is now a reality. The university has told me and several other teaching assistants that we will be fired unless we pay up.

At the University of Chicago, graduate students in a similar position have taken their union to federal court, arguing that forced support of the union violates their constitutional rights. In Graduate Students for Academic Freedom v. Graduate Students United, the plaintiffs—including Jewish students—say they are being compelled to fund a union that promotes the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, a stance they view as antisemitic.

The graduate unions at both Stanford and Chicago are registered as local chapters of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a national union that funds progressive activism. In 2015, it became the first national union to support the BDS movement. The Chicago lawsuit, filed in July 2024, invokes Janus v. Afscme, the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling that public employees can’t be forced to subsidize political speech they disagree with. The Stanford Graduate Workers Union similarly adopted an anti-Israel statement in 2023.

Anna Low:

Skim through the voting section of McGraw Hill’s civics textbook, and you’ll see images from Hillary Clinton’s and Elizabeth Warren’s campaigns (whilst any campaign photos of a certain recent victor who won the popular election are notably absent). Grab the same publisher’s World Historytextbook, and you’ll read that the First Intifada was a “mostly unarmed uprising against Israeli occupation,” conveniently omitting discussion of the 200 murdered Jews. A small oversight, some might say.

Despite conservative efforts to remove DEI, CRT, and other suspect ideologies from classrooms, progressivism remains entrenched in the institutions of American education, including schools of education, accreditors and authorizers, school boards, curricula, unions (duh), publications and conferences, and professional organizations.

Many of these have faced scrutiny, but the multibillion-dollar textbook industry — dominated by major players like Scholastic, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill — has gone largely unexamined. And scrutiny they deserve. At the corporate level, they rival liberal arts campuses in their progressive orthodoxies.

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Total operating spending across Wisconsin cities and villages increased sharply in 2023 after a period of high inflation, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum’s 2025 Municipal DataTool. That was essentially the case in southern Ozaukee County municipalities, though at least one saw a significant jump while another’s spending dropped. The report, released last week, looks at a decade of operating spending using reports compiled by the state Department of Revenue for 2023 and 2024. Dashboards within the tool focus on property taxes, municipal spending, debt, fund balances, shared revenue (a key form of state aid), property values and income and population.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider:

More U.S. consumers now say they’re dialing down spending than when inflation spiked in 2022. Over 70% of people surveyed from May to July plan to tighten their budgets for items with large price increases in the year ahead, according to the University of Michigan’s economic sentiment survey.

High earners were much more likely to keep spending as usual, Joanne Hsu, the Michigan survey’s director, said in her analysis.

Executives at IHOP, McDonald’s and Denny’s have said their middle-class customers are on the hunt for deals, while many lower-income diners are staying away altogether.

At IHOP, customers are choosing cheaper menu items and buying fewer drinks. Denny’s data showed more people who make between $50,000 and $75,000 are coming in for promotions like its $5 breakfast.

Matthew Hennessey:

The murder of children is a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance. If something like Wednesday’s bloodletting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis had happened only once in our nation’s history, it would be the kind of thing to stop every one of us dead in our tracks. Yet it’s happening with regularity, and the great American spectacle keeps rolling along.

The sad reality is that the shock of Minneapolis wore off by kickoff on Saturday. College football is back. Pumpkin spice is coming. Life rumbles on.

I don’t say this to shame you. I’m as guilty as anyone of avoidance and distraction. The daily pressures of household and work are relentless. They demand attention. But snap out of it. Remind yourself that in the United States of America a madman killed two children and wounded 18 in a church attached to a school. It was less than a week ago. Remember, if you can, how your first thought was to wonder what it would feel like if it had been your children in those pews, diving for cover as stained glass rained down around them—your children in a complete panic, your children crying out in fear, your children lying dead in pools of blood.

What is to be done? Complacency in the face of such evil is unforgivable.

Arming teachers isn’t the solution. That’s too much to ask of those whose greatest joy in life is to see the pride of accomplishment in a child’s eyes. I’m not one to put a halo on teachers, but I can’t see the wisdom in putting holsters on them either. That’s a road we could go down only after first admitting that something essential about America has been permanently broken. Kids deserve to learn in pleasant and inviting environments, not behind fortress walls.

Wall Street Journal:

Most economic research shows high minimum wages increase teen unemployment, though there are no doubt other contributors. In a tight labor market, wage mandates may have less of an effect on hiring. But when the economy cools and competition for labor weakens, higher minimums make it more costly to hire teens.

The upshot is that teens lose chances to learn critical life skills, such as showing up on time, following orders and juggling tasks. Politicians love to claim credit for raising the minimum wage, but they never consider the unintended casualties—idle young people who will be less equipped for future careers and life.